Category: Faimeh Burke

Though political scientist Bryce Edwards suggests maybe we shouldn’t vote in this year’s local body elections, I’ve never missed an opportunity to vote in any local or national election (anarchist sympathies notwithstanding).

Canterbury District Health Board members (rank as many/few as you like, up to 26) (Updated9/10/2013)7 are elected but your votes are almost guaranteed to be transferred further down your list, so it’s worth ranking at least 12 if you can bring yourself to do so. I’ve ranked 25 to give my votes the maximum chance of contributing to anyone but Keown (see below).

We have a week and a half to send in our votes for local body elections and then a few days later we’ll have a dramatically changed city council. Quite an exciting time, but the main barrier to informed voting seems to be that most candidates are doing their utmost to portray themselves as being non-party-affiliated and sometimes even ‘non-political.’

I guess candidates want to cash in on cynicism about politicians, and appeal to our lazy post-modern ‘post-political’ ‘post-ideological’ political ideology. But it does make it rather hard to tell what they’re actually standing for, when nobody really follows local politics, and then all we get from the candidates is vaguebillboards and a paragraph of meaningless platitudes.

I’ve been looking into what lies behind these meaningless platitudes. Here’s what I’ve found out – four quick questions I think are worth asking:

1. Who voted for Marryatt’s pay rise?
2. What do the parties mean?
3. Who are the independents?
4. How about the mayoral candidates?

1. Who voted for Marryatt’s pay rise?

The seven right-wing councillors who voted for Tony Marryatt’s $68,000 pay rise won’t hold the balance of power anymore after the election – Bob Parker, Sue Wells and Barry Corbett are stepping down.

But the other four are standing again – Jamie Gough and Claudia Reid are standing for I-Citz in Fendalton-Waimairi, and Ngaire Button and Aaron Keown are standing for City 1st in Shirley-Papanui. There’s been some helpful billboard adjustments to remind us of who they are.

Gough is grovelling and asked to be forgiven, pleading youth and inexperience. $538,529 probably doesn’t sound like too much to a member of the Gough family… I guess he didn’t realise how pissed off everyone would be.

Anyway, hopefully voters haven’t forgotten how pissed off we were. James Dann is predicting two of the four will make it back – hopefully it’s less.

People’s Choice (formerly Christchurch 2021) was founded by Labour Party members in 1995. They’re open about their connection to Labour on their website.

The current People’s Choice councillors (Yani Johanson, Jimmy Chen, Glenn Livingstone) seem to have done pretty well from what I’ve heard.

City 1st ≃ National/ACT

A new spin-off of I-Citz and the now-defunct City Vision, City 1st try harder than the other parties to act like they’re not a party. I challenged them about this on their Facebook page and while Ngaire Button responded, she didn’t give me a good explanation of what makes her party not really a party. There were a few more comments today, but before I got a chance to read them, they deleted the whole thread and seem to have disabled all comments on their page. Thankfully I was paranoid enough to expect this and save some screenshots.

I learned today that apparently four other council candidates are standing as a loose alliance – Raf Manji, Vicki Buck, Ali Jones (more on them below) and Erin Jackson.

They’re not using shared branding and they don’t have a group name, but they know each other, agreed to stand in four different wards, and seem to be into the same kind of things: participatory democracy and budgeting, environmental sustainability, community collaboration, ‘e-democracy’ and social entrepreneurship. All four are endorsed by It’s Our City.

They’re arguably just as much of a party as the others, and perhaps a lot of the same criticisms I’m making to City 1st apply to them too. But I think they’re a more genuine alternative to ‘party politics’ than City 1st – they seem to have a quite different view of how to do democracy. They also seem more genuinely bipartisan – they seem keen to work with Dalziel as mayor, and they seem more left than right, but not in really a traditional sense. But they’re enthusiastically endorsed by the right-leaning Sam Johnson, who’s not standing this time but he’s amongst their group.

The best way to find out about unaffiliated independents seems to be to google them and see what they’ve done before, and check if they have blogs etc. I can only comment on a few…

Fendalton/Waimairi:Raf Manji seems an intelligent guy with his finger in a lot of pies. My impression was that Faimeh Burke is most famous for her husband, Sir Kerry Burke, a former Labour MP and one of the ECan councillors the government dumped in 2010 (but see Jean-Luc’s comment below).

Shirley-Papanui:Ali Jones is a prominent critic of EQC and advocate for claimants. Jono Corfe is the quizmaster at Chch’s best pub quiz.

Riccarton/Wigram:Vicki Buck is bringing herself back (yet sadly without taking great pun opportunities). She was a popular (independent) mayor from 1989 to 1998 and since then has worked in clean energy and set up Unlimited and Discovery One schools.

4. How about the mayoral candidates?

Lianne Dalziel = Labour

I almost forgot to the mention the mayoral race, because it seems to be in the bag for Lianne Dalziel (but please nobody mention seismic shifts). Dalziel is running as an independent but she’s been a Labour party MP since 1990 (she’s stepping down to run for mayor). Since the earthquake she seems to have battled for the people of Christchurch better than most local MPs, particularly for her Christchurch East electorate. It’s a shame she won’t get a chance to take Gerry Brownlee’s job when the next Labour government gets in. But I think she’ll make a pretty good mayor, particularly if she follows through on social housing promises.

A fun fact about Dalziel that you won’t read elsewhere: as an idealistic teenager just returned from Cambodia, I e-mailed every MP and asked them to sponsor me for the 40 Hour Famine. Lianne Dalziel was the only one who did – she sponsored me $40.

Paul Lonsdale ≃ National/Business

Dalziel’s main competition, Paul Lonsdale, is best-known as manager of the Central City Business Association, which meant driving the youths away from the Hack circle before the earthquake, and managing the Re-Start container mall after it. He thinks political organisations should be run like businesses rather than political organisations (so he’s moving in the opposite direction to the ‘post-corporate’ democratic ideas of Manji et al).

Following a familiar theme, Lonsdale claims to be “completely apolitical,” but all his friends seem to be National Party/I-Citz members, and he thinks we need to work alongside Brownlee et al rather than challenging them. He also thinks dumping ECan democracy and selling council assets makes sense.

After an eleventh-hour resurrection of Cut Your Hair just before the 2017 NZ election, the blog has re-overtaken its old rivals Put ’em all on an island, Keeping Stock and, the ultimate nemesis, Room 5 @ Melville Intermediate School.

(However, these rankings should be taken with a large grain of salt because not every blog is included, the stats are very fakeable, and each counter gives different stats, as you’ll see below)